312 Collectors and 56 Intermediaries, Oil on paper, 19cm x 24 cm 
& handwriting on the wall 
2023


This work departs from an academic survey mapping the labour networks of the edible wild mushroom trade in and around Istanbul — the city where the artist was born and raised. The study enumerates foragers, intermediaries, and species; it quantifies an industry. What the research does not do is look at the mushrooms. The work takes this omission as its point of departure. Six mushroom species named in the survey are drawn in oil on paper as individual portraits — repositioned from commodity to subject, from data point to presence. The gesture is quiet but deliberate: portraiture is a form historically reserved for those whose individuality is considered worth recording. Extending it to Lactarius or Cantharellus is not illustration; it is a proposal about who counts as a subject of attention. Alongside the portraits, handwriting on the wall reintroduces fragments of the survey's language — its categories, its counts — into proximity with the images. The distance between the two registers becomes the work's central tension: what the economic study made visible, and what it could not see.


*Inspired by the book Mushroom at the End of the World by Anna Tsing.
*Exhibition view in Künstlerhaus Lauenburg, 2023